Myst was so beautiful, so compelling, so revolutionary, that its sequel created impossible expectations - especially among its obsessed creators. Jon Carroll on the exclusive inside story of making Riven.

On my last evening in Spokane, after
I had wandered Riven's caves and
forests, after I had turned a dozen animated valves and seen a dozen Mysterious thrones
and eaten of the five-lobed fruit, after I had lingered under the winking planetarium in the
basement lair of the creators of the caves and forests and valves and thrones one last time,
after
I had brooded about landscape and memory and constructed lonely theories on the deserted
high-way; after all those things, I revisited the place where the story began again.

In the corner of a strip mall on the northern border of Spokane, Washington, stood a mattress store called Comfort World. The only sign of its former tenants was a distinctive blue trim that ran along the roof line, a sort of deep aqua that people who work with color might call cyan. I had been in that building one year before, when the company called Cyan had been occupying it.
As tacky and ungainly as the building was, it was a step up from the old Cyan offices in the garage of the man named Chris Brandkamp. That garage (the walls of the conference room downstairs had been plastic, with tiny clattering space heaters that barely cut the chill - I could remember meetings in that office where all the participants looked as though they were about to mount the final push for the Pole) was in turn bigger and more luxurious than the basement of Robyn Miller's house, where Myst had been created. Myst was what kept me coming back to Spokane, Myst and its successor, Myst II (as it was called in the garage days) or Riven (as it is called today). Myst was the best story I had ever stumbled onto. It was an astonishing phenomenon, a computer game produced by some people in rural Washington, not near the Microsoft-shadowed Seattle but way over on the eastern edge of the state, near nothing else. And from this unlikely soil had sprung a game that topped the sales charts for years, a Mysterious nonviolent ruminative scary passionate CD-ROM experience like nothing the world had seen before.

When matched against, say, Vermeer or Melville, it wasn't much, but in the limited world of computer games, it was high art. It was Shakespeare. At the time I stood there in the parking lot, in May of this year, Myst had sold 3.5 million units. Figuring very conservatively, that meant something like US$20 million had rolled into tiny Cyan, not counting subsidiary rights, sundry accessories, book deals, and T-shirts.

And the story behind Myst was even stranger than these figures. Its creators were two brothers, Rand and Robyn Miller, evangelical Christians who lived in the literal backwoods of eastern Washington, in homes surrounded by pine trees (Rand) or wheat fields (Robyn), in country that was not far from a fortified enclave called Ruby Ridge. They made up Myst entirely out of whole cloth - strange cloth, cloth not available in the great centers of commerce. When I first met them in 1994, after Myst was a certified hit but before they had seen much money from it, they were about to cross uncharted waters. Money was about to come flowing in, money and prestige and temptation and pressure. They were about to become some version of the oldest American narrative: We believe in money, we believe that money corrupts, and we believe in corruption. We despise the cycle, and we rush to embrace it.

I walked across the puddled parking lot and peered in the windows: a panoply of products designed to provide gracious horizontality. I saw the dim shadow of the reception desk, minus the cut-glass bowl of hard candy that had been a Cyan tradition from the beginning. I remembered ...

April 1996: Bonnie Staub looked cold. Her nose was red. She was wearing a down parka and gripping a sheaf of papers. There is in every good office a person who acts as the hub and pivot, the person who can always find the things that are lost and forget the instructions that are unwise, who has such a good grip on the truth that she knows when to lie, who has a loyalty not often rewarded with a salary commensurate to her value. Bonnie was that person at Cyan; she returned my phone calls and gave me useful information; even her studied vagueness had content. And she seemed to be fighting some undefined strangeness, a peculiar gloom created from cramped offices and bad vibes and the lingering Spokane winter and something more. It all made me fretful. Something was up.

Jon Carroll writes a daily column for the San Francisco Chronicle. He wrote "Guerillas in the Myst" in Wired 2.08.